Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The Horn Book Magazine

Drowning in Success: The Sand in the Oyster.

Article Excerpt
And thick and fast they came at last, / and more, and more, and more--" as Tweedledee said to Alice about supplicant oysters. This year his words apply just as well to young adult publishing. My office shelves, usually more than adequate to hold a year's worth of YA fiction, overflow with enticing and provocative novels--fat fantasies, sequels to sequels, first volumes of new trilogies, books by famous authors, and those by first-time novelists. There are books ranged on the desk, the couch, the floor. What accounts for this sudden leap? What does it mean, and will it last?

Last June The Wall Street Journal called YA "one of the book industry's healthiest segments" and quoted estimates by Albert Greco, an industry analyst at Fordham University, that YA sales at that time were up twenty-three percent since 1999. In comparison, the Journal reported that adult sales in the same period were down slightly more than one percent. "YA is where it's at," says Karen Wojtyla, executive editor at Margaret K. McElderry Books, who sees "a general feeling of excitement over young adult literature" among publishers.

Demographics, of course, is the first explanation that leaps to mind. Children of baby boomers reached adolescence several years ago, and 60 Minutes reported in September that between 1982 and 1995 eighty million of them were born, making these so-called echo boomers the largest generation of young people since the 1960s. Most important for...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!